


Marlboro Man

by AndThatWasEnough



Series: Marlboro 'Verse [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: 14x11 speculation, Cigarettes, Episode: s14e10 Nihilism, Gen, Mentions of terminal illness, No one actually dies in this, Season/Series 14 Speculation, Season/Series 14 Spoilers, Smoking, about the family dynamic, allusion to eventual character death, but they sort of get a beach day!, christmastime-ish, episode tag: s14e10 Nihilism, it's also just sort of a story about life and all that, just sorta sat down and banged this out, like...a lot of mentions, this is...not happy, ya know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 12:20:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17467436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndThatWasEnough/pseuds/AndThatWasEnough
Summary: “How am I supposed to make sure it happens?  What do I do to make sure?” He asks.  “To make sure Michael doesn’t get his chance.”Billie’s mouth lifts in a one-sided sarcastic smile.  “Keep smokin’, Marlboro Man.  Keep smokin’.”





	Marlboro Man

**Author's Note:**

> This coda is instantly going to become an AU with next week's episode "Damaged Goods", but I couldn't resist the temptation to just sit down and write this. As soon as Billie said there was just one path that didn't include Michael taking back over and destroying everything, this is what popped into my head, partly born of the fact that Dean was originally supposed to be tatted-up and smoke like a chimney, an idea I will forever be in love with. And Dean's relationship with Death as an entity - that too. 
> 
> Happy reading :)

Dean started smoking at a fairly young age.

It wasn’t as if Dad cared – he’d been in Vietnam, knew the familiar itch for nicotine, that need to just sit and smoke after a long day, or early in the morning, or in the car, or, or, or…or lots of places.  He’d idly mentioned to Dean once that it really wasn’t good for him, that of course he smoked, everyone smoked back in his day, servicemen especially.  Dean then quipped that he wasn’t so far off from those guys’ situation – he just wasn’t shootin’ Gooks, is all.  And then his Dad smiled and bummed a smoke off him, and they sat quietly together on the hood of the Impala after one of their trickier hunts, made trickier by Sammy’s absence.

Yep, that had been Dean.  He compensated for his pretty-boy face with cigarettes and tattoos and weird jewelry and an _underachiever and proud of it!_ attitude that he had pretty much immediately adopted from Bart Simpson back in 1989 with the rest of the guys his age.  Hell, that was _still_ Dean, just watered down now that he was creeping up on forty in a matter of days and had been subdued by life, the universe, and everything.

Sam used to really get on his ass about the cigarettes.  The kid had been indoctrinated by the DARE program and took it upon himself to get Dean to quit.  He never fought Dad, he knew better, but he fought Dean.  Gave him statistics about secondhand smoke and guilt-tripped him about how all the kids could smell the nicotine and ash on him and instantly get a read of _TRAILER TRASH._ He told him about all the cancers, of the lungs and the throat and the jaw.  He had pictures and pamphlets and everything.  Sam was still saying _Just Say No!_ even when Bill Clinton was in office.  Dean would quit for a few days at a time, but it just proved to be too much for him, and the nicotine gums and patches never helped in the way he thought they were supposed to, and then he’d just start back up again.  In the end, it wasn’t Sam that got him to quit – no, that didn’t happen until after he had left for Stanford.  What got to Dean was a raging head cold that morphed into a raging _chest_ cold that morphed then into pneumonia and landed him in the hospital.

“Jesus!” Dad had squawked when they showed him the X-rays of his son’s lungs.  “I’m no professional, but I’m pretty sure lungs ain’t s’posed to look like _that_.”

Dean’s doctor didn’t even try to hide his eyeroll.  “ _Yes_ , well, I spoke to your son and I’ve made it clear to him that his nicotine habit certainly didn’t help his cause, and I don’t care how healthy the rest of him is – if he keeps it up, he’ll have the lungs of a ninety-year-old undertaker with seventy years’ experience.  And asthma.”

So Dad yelled at him when they got home about how he needed him on the job, and how no one with gross-looking lungs like his would ever last, and that this just needed to stop _right the fuck now_ , hear me?  Dean nodded, not all that upset because he was sick and would do whatever it took to never feel this crummy ever again.  So he quit.  Cold turkey.  It was pretty rough at first, like they say, but over time he just kept telling himself that he needed to stay sharp for the job, stay sharp for his old man, needed to be around because if he wasn’t on this Earth to do this job, who would be?  So he quit.

Well, mostly.

What’s funny is that Dean sort of _was_ an undertaker anyways.  He’d burned enough bones and monster corpses and possessed objects that it wasn’t as if he was avoiding getting shit in his lungs anyways.  And every now and then, even after he quit and Sam was back with him and Dad had died and he’d sold his soul and come back from Hell rehymenated with fancy new lungs, he still needed to step outside and light up.  Just every now and then.  He’d come to be able to control those urges over the years.  He lived in a state of near-constant tension, so he saved the smokes for the _really_ tough times, which he differentiated from the pretty tough times and the sorta tough times and the plain-old regular tough times, the nothing-special tough times.

He could stop whenever he wanted.

And he did.  The smoking, that is.  Just a few times a year, anymore.  Maybe a few more, give or take, depending on the times.

But burning the bodies?  Yeah, that never stops.

xXx

Rocky’s Bar smelled like cigarettes.

Guess Dean’s was one of the last establishments that wasn’t non-smoking.

That little detail probably could (should) have tipped him off that this was all in his head.

xXx

“Do you remember visiting my reading room?  The shelves and shelves of notebooks describing the way you might die?”

“Yeah – upbeat classics.”  Dean can’t help but be a smartass.  Billie doesn’t quite intimidate him the way the old Death did.  Probably not a smart move.

Billie just stares at him.  “Well.  It’s the funniest thing, but they’ve all been rewritten.”  Now her expression shows a bit more concern, though Dean’s smart enough to know that concern is not for him but for this entire universe – this universe of universes – that she is in charge of overseeing.  “With the archangel Michael escaping your mind and using you as his vessel to burn down this world.”

It’s a punch to the gut.  “All of them.”  Not a question, really, so much as a statement.

“All of them.”  A beat of silence as Billie raises her hand, holding out one of those books from one of those shelves to Dean.  “Except _one_.”

Dean accepts it.  He has to.  He considers the book for a moment, wondering if how thin it is really means anything, or if maybe the print is just small.  Ya know, to save paper.  Billie’s staring at him, encouraging him silently to read on.  She wants to be here for this, see his reaction.  Why else would she stay?  And so he flips to the end, making sure he doesn’t read a single word in that book except for the very last line on the very last page.

To say what he finds is upsetting is an understatement.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“That’s up to you.”

Dean has questions.  He has so many questions, all of them blurring together in his head and making it impossible for him to decipher what exactly he wants to ask first, but when he looks up, Billie is gone.

xXx

He’s not even quite sure _why_ he has questions.  The ending was pretty straight-forward, after all. 

xXx

Dean thinks of what normal people do when they learn these things.  About how they think of courses of action, what comes next, who to call, what’s on the bucket list.  He thinks of Jack, sick and dying and wanting to get a parking ticket.  A _parking ticket_.  A parking ticket!  What sort of ridiculous world did they live in?  What sort of absurd, Dickensian (yes, Sam!  Lookit yer big brother now!) planet was this where Jack, a stand-in for Tiny Tim if Dean ever saw one, had getting a parking ticket on his bucket list? 

He remembered it was Christmas.  Or, it had been.  It was over now, just barely.  Dean wandered out from his bedroom into the rest of the bunker, found Jack in his Dean Cave watching _White Christmas_ , the little pansy.  Or – no, no.  Just…no.  

“Can I watch with you?” Dean asks instead, thinking of bucket lists and parking tickets and shelves and shelves of books with almost all the same ending.

Jack smiles up at him.  “Sure!”

Dean sits in the other chair.  He doesn’t really pay attention to the movie, watches Jack more, watches him react.  Dean’s maybe seen the movie only once, but he just doesn’t care.  At the moment, he doesn’t want to be alone, but he doesn’t want to be with Sam or Cas, who would press him with questions.  He prefers to be with Jack and his ever-waning innocence.

“Jack?  Promise me somethin.’”

Jack takes the time to pause the movie so he doesn’t miss a single minute, then he looks at Dean with those earnest eyes.  Dean mentally kicks himself for ever treating this poor kid like shit.  “Sure.  What is it?”

Dean lets out a small sigh.  “Never smoke.”

Jack furrows his brow and looks at him like he just said the dumbest thing on the planet.  “Um.  Okay?”  With that tone, and that confused smile, he even sounds like a regular teenager, and it’s so normal that Dean lets the attitude pass and tells him to turn the movie back on.

xXx

It was supposed to be a blaze of glory.

This was not that.

xXx

But it’s not like he’s just going to let Michael get away with this.  Dean let him in, let him stay, and so he either lets him bust out and take over one last time so he can go on destroying worlds ( _“I am become death, destroyer of worlds_ ” or whatever).

Or Dean could do what he always does, be the stand-up guy and take one for the team and take that one path that doesn’t result in literally getting fucked over.

He knows without thinking that he’s going to let it happen.

He doesn’t know when.  He didn’t read the when.  Remember?  He just read the last line on the last page, the line that said just _how_ it was going to happen, not when.  Dean could live with that.  He could live with knowing _what_ and not _when_.  What was one more surprise, anyways?  One more fresh twist to the knot?

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  Yes…yes.  That would be the way he would go.

xXx

But waiting for it is a bastard, he won’t deny that.

xXx

One night, as he’s hiding out in his room, Dean picks up Billie’s book and reads up to the point they’re at now in the timeline.  It starts, as it will end, very innocuously: _Dean Henry Winchester was born to John and Mary Winchester on the twenty-fourth day of January, in the year of Our Lord one-thousand, nine-hundred, and seventy-nine in Lawrence, Kansas._ Dean had always wished to have Sam’s middle name, William – it was a lot stronger than Henry, even though it didn’t really matter because they never used them, and now they knew that poor Henry Winchester hadn’t been such a bad guy after all.  He just wishes their father could have known that.

It’s not a particularly entertaining or well-written read, especially considering he already knows all of it, though Dean suspects it’s not supposed to be – it’s for informational purposes.  For Billie’s purposes.  So she can Know.  It’s all very factual, how he had a heart attack that should have killed him but didn’t; how he sold his soul but still came back; how he helped avert the Apocalypse; how he had fathered an Amazon daughter that was now in Purgatory; how he himself had _been_ to Purgatory; how he’d bore the Mark of Cain and been a Knight of Hell and released the Darkness and reunited her with her brother; all of that and the mundane stuff, too, about how he’s allergic to cats and has a birthmark on his ass the shape of Idaho and his cholesterol really isn’t that great, but that’s still not what’s gonna get him.  He reads about how he’s now been possessed twice by the archangel Michael, and since this is the version that doesn’t end with him becoming repossessed for a third time, Dean is a little gratified to see there are still some pages after that part.

He doesn’t read ahead.  He doesn’t want to spoil anything.

But he already knows the ending – even, again, if he doesn’t know the when – so he flips to it once more and reads it again.

xXx

_After a lifetime of dodging the supernatural and fighting a war against Earth’s monsters, Dean Winchester will succumb to a prolonged and difficult battle with Adenocarcinoma, or lung cancer._

xXx

It’s poetry, really.

xXx

A prolonged and difficult battle.  But not with a monster or a ghost or an angel or a demon.

With fucking lung cancer.

xXx

The thing is, Dean knows already that he will do whatever it takes to get that outcome.  Hell, he’ll even take up smoking again and start going on even more salt-‘n’-burns to speed up the process, just so this stupid world can keep turning.  So Sam can…can get a dog and Cas can chase after the taste of his beloved PB&J and Jack can finally get that parking ticket.  He’ll do it because Mom has a thing for this other Bobby, and she deserves a shot at that.  He’ll do it for Jody and Donna and the girls.  He’ll do it for every person they saved from that other world, the one Billie warned him about going to.  Dean maintains that it was worth it.  Because the alternative, the ninety-nine percent possibility?  He will do everything in his power to avoid it.

He hasn’t left his room much, like back in October and the first time.  Dean stares up at the ceiling at night, listening to the quiet around him while his voice yammers on inside his head.  That voice has all sorts of thoughts and questions, about what it’ll feel like and when it’s gonna start and what everyone’s reaction to it is going to be and if it’s worth telling anybody about yet.  This is quite the burden Billie has laid on his shoulders, but better this than all that death.  He was small potatoes.  The voice also wondered if treatment would be a smart idea because what if he beats it?  Because then Michael would have time to take back over.  Maybe Dean would try it for a while, then claim it was just making him sicker and more miserable and that it just wasn’t worth it anymore. 

Things had been looking so _good_ not so long ago.

But Dean…Dean could live with this.

He kept telling himself that, hoping it would eventually sink in.  It was starting to, but it was still all so surreal.  And lame.  Lung cancer?  Fuckin’ _lung cancer?_ Lame as _fuck_.  At least it wasn’t going to be in his ass.  That would really be embarrassing.  Small mercies, he supposed. 

“Small mercies,” he whispered to the ceiling, a reassurance, then sighed.

xXx

“Ya know, I was thinking, if you wanted…you could get away for a little while.  Maybe you could go say hi to Mom and Bobby?  Spend a few days at Donna’s, just sorta…become one with nature or whatever.  Too cold to swim, obviously, but – “

“One with nature?” Dean repeated.  “That’s your beat.”

“I know,” Sam said testily, obviously already preparing for his brother to put up a fight, “but that’s not the point.  The point is to take a breather, recover.  You deserve that much.”

“Maybe,” Dean hummed.  “Yeah, it might be nice,” he allowed, and Sam wilted with relief.

“Yeah, I think it would be.  Maybe you could go ice fishing or something.  You like fishing.”

Yes, he did like fishing.  It was calm and quiet, and Dean could sit alone with his thoughts without having to be actually alone if he didn’t want to be because the whole point of fishing was to be quiet.  Sometimes Dean would catch a few, let them flop around until they died so he could take them home and gut them and fry them up.  Sam had always liked fish.  Other times, Dean would let his catches go because he just liked the sport of it.  If you could call fishing a sport.  Golf was a sport, was fishing?

“Or bowling,” Sam continued.  “You love going bowling.”

“Sam.”  Dean levels him with a stare over the island.  Sam’s sitting innocently at the table.  “I know what I like.  And I know that people do things they like when they go on vacation.”

“Oh?” Sam intones.  “Do you, now?  Because last I recall, we haven’t exactly ever been on one.”

“Yeah, well, I just know,” Dean says, waving off the Devil’s Advocate.  “Because you’re…the point’s to get all zen or whatever, right?  To return to yourself?  And if returning to myself means going ice fishing and bowling, then by God that’s what I’mma do.”

Sam shakes his head.  “You’re cracked.”  He snorts.  “ _Returning to yourself_ , that’s good.  That’s a good one, coming from you.”  Dean smirks.  “So…you’ll go?”

Dean goes.  And in between shit inevitably hitting the fan, he does do some fishing and bowling.  He does some odd jobs for Donna, which she seems genuinely grateful for.  He schools both her and his mother at the alley, not feeling the least bit goofy in his gigantic bowling shoes because he is _damn_ good at bowling and scores well over two-hundred.  He’s got a perfect game somewhere in Alabama, and another one in Maryland. 

“Uffdah,” Donna says brightly.  “I learn somethin’ new ‘bout ya every day, don’t I?” She laughs.  Dean shrugs bashfully, but not really.

“We all have our talents,” he says, batting his eyes, and Donna and Mom laugh again.

Dean thinks of Jack then, of fishing with him.  How he said that he wouldn’t miss Tahiti or the Taj Mahal – he’d miss the little things.  Like more time with him.  Dean knows it’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s true.  He thinks about how they won’t miss him in the grand scheme.  He is one man.  He is _one_ man.  It’s very melodramatic, very _Sophie’s Choice_ and _Tuesdays with Morrie_ , but shit – it’s him or the universe.  It’s no contest.

xXx

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

Dean turns and sees his mother.  He shrugs sheepishly, takes a long drag off his cigarette and blows smoke rings into the frigid Minnesota air – a trick he perfected over many years.  Mom even looks a little impressed.  “Not often.  Anymore,” he amends.  “Used to be real bad about it, but now…”

“Good for you,” Mom says, speaking to his quitting.  Dean’s mouth quirks into something like a smile.  “But why right now?”

“Just everything,” he says.  “Just trying to come down off it all.”

Mom nods her understanding and sits beside him on the bench swing, looking out at the lake and the woods beyond them, the moon shining off the water and not a sound to be heard.  This little lake town really is nowhere.  “That was another thing, when I came back.  It’s just…no one does it anymore.”

They really don’t.

xXx

Before he leaves, Mom and Donna insist on baking him a cake.  For his birthday.  It’s an impromptu little celebration, and Dean grins and thanks them and blows out all forty candles after they sing to him very off-key.  All forty candles.  Not as easy as it used to be.

xXx

“…and Jack has become interested in doing more reading that’s less lore-focused, so I found a list of American classics for him to start with that I believe he’ll be able to comprehend…”

Jack proudly presents him with his stack of books.  _Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Little Women, The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, The Natural, Gone with the Wind_.  It’s quite the list, thousands of pages, but Jack seems to be looking forward to it, and though he knows nothing of culture, Cas seems to be excited to act as some kind of schoolmarm.  Dean doesn’t know if these were all in their library, this massive room where they were sitting now.  Dean also wondered if they should get the kid a library card.

“Cool,” Dean nods, still only half-listening.  This is so small compared to everything they have to deal with, but he’s happy for the kid.

“I’m trying to help him feel normal.  Human,” Cas tells him in confidence later.  “What he did was selfless, but…dangerous.  I want to shift his focus.  It’s a start,” he says at Dean’s skeptical look.  “Do you have a better idea?  Because what if he goes out on a hunt and does the same thing?  It’s a reflex.”

Cas is desperate.  Dean is almost glad for it.  He wants Cas and Jack to have new focuses.  He wants Sam to keep doing what he’s doing, leading.  He wants Cas to do this whole homeschool parent thing.  He wants…he wants Jack to have everything he didn’t.  They need to have things to hang onto After.  Even if Dean doesn’t know when After is.  “I get it,” Dean finally says.  “It’s a start.”

xXx

It feels like everything is always just a start.  Nothing ever gets finished.  There’s always…well, a fresh twist to the knot.

xXx

Baby already has a lingering smell of cigarettes, so sometimes he goes on drives just so he can have the excuse to smoke.  He’ll park the car out in one of Lebanon’s many fields and sit and smoke and pretend it’s 1967, when a sight like this – a man like him, bogarting a Marlboro in a ’67 Impala in the middle of some field on some farm – could be even remotely normal.  He’s even kinda dressed like a farmer, he supposes. 

One of the times, he even gets a visitor.

“What’s this?”

He’s just sitting on the hood of the car when Billie shows up.  He doesn’t even flinch.  “Smokin’.”

“Smokin’ to live, or smokin’ to die?” She asks smartly, cocking an eyebrow.  Billie almost looks amused with him.

“Why’re you here?”

“Answer my question first.”

Dean sighs.  “To die, Billie,” he grins.  “To die.  You know how this story ends same as I do.  I can’t let Michael out,” he says more seriously.  “I can’t.  I’m okay with this.  I’m just trying to get to the end before Michael does.”

Billie now raises both her eyebrows in quiet surprise.  Maybe she’s just a little bit proud of him for finally doing the right thing.  “You should tell them,” is what she says.  “This isn’t the sort of thing you should just spring on them, believe it or not.  You have a rare gift.”

“Gift?” Dean repeats, then laughs humorlessly.  “This ain’t no gift.  I’m choosing this, Billie.  That don’t mean I like it.”

“But you are at peace with it,” she says.  “You’ve had time to find that peace.  You owe them that much.”

Dean looks at her with skepticism.  There’s something very odd about this interaction.  “Why you bein’ so nice to me?  Huh?  What’s your angle?”

“No angle,” she shrugs casually.  “Besides gratitude, perhaps.  You and your brother and that angel Castiel screw up constantly, and for once – “

“For once?” Dean repeats.  “You know how many times the three of us have given ourselves up for the greater good?” He spits, finding some fire.  “I’m sick of it!  But I don’t see any other options!”  He takes an angry drag off his cigarette and blows the smoke out like he’s a fire-breathing dragon, which Dean thinks would be pretty cool because real life dragons are kinda lame. 

“I believe you’re actually doing a service to yourself this time, Dean,” she says calmly, not letting him get her goat.  “It’s for the greater good, yes.  And it will be painful.  It will be a very horrific thing, in a very human way that I don’t think you’re quite prepared for.  Yet.  I can see it all, Dean, and in the end, you will see.”

“I will _see_ ,” he mocks, waving his hands.  “Spare me.”

“I am.”

Dean swallows.  “How am I supposed to make sure it happens?  What do I do to make _sure?_ ” He asks.  “To make sure Michael doesn’t get his chance.”

Billie’s mouth lifts in a one-sided sarcastic smile.  “Keep smokin’, Marlboro Man.  Keep smokin’.”

xXx

Dean makes pancakes.  Dean makes pancakes and fries up two pounds of bacon (probably) and homemade hash browns and biscuits and sets out jam and butter and even some fruit for Sam so he doesn’t have to hear him bitch.  He smokes the whole time because he’s starting to itch for it again, just like the old days, just like when he and the old man would sit on the Impala after a hunt and wind down.  He’s smoking to die.  He’s smoking to save the whole damn world.  He’s smoking for whatever mercy Billie has in store for him. 

“What’s this?”

Dean looks over his shoulder, finds Sam.  “What’s it look like?  It’s breakfast!”

Sam sniffs the air.  Dean thinks it smells pretty damn good, if you were to ask him.  He’s a damn good cook.  Like fishing and bowling, as Sam pointed out, this is one of the things he likes to do.  He’s gonna hang onto that.  He’s gonna hang on to the fact that he, Dean, likes fishing and bowling and cooking and that book Billie gave him can’t capture that.  It may know about the birthmark on his ass, but it doesn’t know how good his blueberry pancakes are, and the Universe can’t take that away from him.  It won’t.

“You’ve been smoking,” Sam says matter-of-fact. 

“And we’ve only got one crappy, chipped ashtray.”  Dean shakes his head.  Sam watches him; he looks disappointed.  Dean prepares himself for the DARE speech, but his brother doesn’t say anything.  “Get Cas and Jack in here.  There’s too much food and I don’t wanna waste it.”

Jack’s eyes grow wide at the sight, and Cas gives Dean a funny look, but Dean’s too busy piling up his plate alongside Jack to respond.  Cas does the courteous thing and fixes himself a plate, and Sam does the same, even thanks him for putting out fruit, though his voice sounds kind of funny. 

“What brought all this on?” He asks.  Dean shrugs.

“I like cooking.  Just like I like fishing and bowling,” Dean says smartly, smiling at Sam like it’s some sort of inside-joke.  Sam doesn’t smile back.

“I think you should do this every morning,” Jack says, already on his seconds.

“That’s quite a lot of work, Jack,” Cas tells him.  “We can’t ask Dean to do that.”

“Yeah,” Jack allows.  “But it would be nice if it were easy and we could have this every morning.”

“What about Krunch Cookie Crunch?”

Sam allows himself to get distracted from his own concerns for a moment and goes on a tirade about GMOs and trans fats and processed sugars that they’ve all heard before.  Dean can’t help but smile about it, even with the bomb he’s about to drop.  “To tell the truth, I kinda wanted to talk to you guys about something.”

“I knew it!” Sam pounces.  “And that whole fuckin’ kitchen smelled like nicotine.”

“That’s a bad word,” Jack reminds him.  “Four-dollar.  And what’s nicotine?”

“A chemical found in cigarettes,” Cas explains.  “Dean, you were smoking?  I haven’t seen you do that in years.”

“Neither have I,” Sam said accusingly, staring daggers.  Not mad, but…confused, maybe, and definitely upset.  He clearly thought his anti-smoking propaganda had worked.  “What’s wrong?”

Dean tries to keep smiling.  He starts ripping up one of his biscuits; it’s so flaky.  He’s so good at this.  “I talked to Billie,” he began.  “And she gave me a lot to think about.”

xXx

When he finishes telling them, the three of them sit in stunned silence.  Jack looks confused, but Sam and Cas don’t.  In fact, they look like they perfectly understand what’s going on, why Dean has chosen this, what his plan is, but they don’t like it.  He can see their minds already racing to find a way out of this, to change the course of Fate yet again, to once again extend Dean’s lease on life, but Dean knows that’s not going to happen.  Billie told him; in order to keep Michael locked in there, to keep that particular tragedy from happening, he needed to keep on smoking.

xXx

“You’re just going to let yourself get sick?”

Jack has darkened his doorstep.  Ever since their family meeting this morning, Sam and Cas have gone into hyperdrive, which is also just a way for them to avoid him.  Dean figures their pretty upset with him right now, thinking he’s given up like he always does and now they’re going to have to save him.  But not this time.  Dean knows this intrinsically.  He just has a feeling about it.

“I guess,” Dean breathes.  “Kid.  It could be years from now.  I don’t know.  It’s written in the stars, Jack,” he says with a touch of humor.  “There are two options.  I choose this.  I’m okay with it.”  Usually.  He was usually okay with it.  Not always.  Sometimes it made him so mad he wanted to run as far from here as he could and just scream.  And sometimes, he did just that.  But he drove – never ran.

Jack is near tears already.  “I don’t understand,” he says miserably.

“You don’t have to.”  Dean pats the spot on the bed next to him.  “Jack, you ever seen _The Simpsons?_ ”  Jack shakes his head, his eyes still welling up.  “Well, c’mere, then.  I think you’re really gonna like this Lisa kid.  You and her are on the same wavelength.”

Jack looks skeptical, but he nods and sits down next to Dean and as the screen lights up with bright yellows and pinks and Marge’s blue hair, he even starts to laugh.

xXx

“You don’t have to understand this, Sam.  You don’t have to fix this.  There’s time.  It’s not happening right now.  I just have to do what I have to do to make sure it does.  The universe, Sam.  Not just the Earth this time.  The whole universe of universes.”

…

..

.

“I’m okay with this, Sammy.  Sammy, _I’m okay with this_.”

…

..

.

“…You really have time?”

“Yes.  I don’t know how much, but yes.  The universe, Sammy.  Please.”

…

..

.

“I hate you sometimes.”

“I’m okay with that.”

“But I love you most of the time.”

“Right.”

“And you’re going to die a slow and painful and semi-natural death someday just so you can save the universe one last time.”

“That’s about right.”

Dean takes a drag off his cigarette and smiles.  Sam smiles back all watery and shaky and unconfident, but also with all the love in the world. 

“You’re a fuckin’ jerk,” Sam spits.  “Always need the spotlight.”

But he keeps smiling.

xXx

So for once, they do nothing about it.

Well, Dean keeps smoking.  But that’s the extent of it.

xXx

They don’t tell Mom.  She doesn’t need that.  The four of them is enough.  When it does eventually happen, whenever that may be, she’ll have to find her peace with it, too.  But she shouldn’t have to now.  She deserved to have a Now that was as joyous as they could make it.

xXx

Billie was privy to the much larger picture.

She had many souls to oversee, but there were few storylines that interested her as much as this one, even years later.  It wasn’t right to pick favorites, she knew that, but she couldn’t help it; those Winchesters were her guilty pleasure.  Pop some popcorn and sit back.

Years later.  It was a fair amount of years later.

She could not even begin to fathom how that had happened.

xXx

Dean started coughing at the beach.  A place called Englewood in Florida, not far from Fort Myers.  Small beach town, good seafood.  Family road trip, complete with a soundtrack of the Traveling Wilburys and Dean’s Marlboro’s and cheesy Hawaiian shirts and plenty of pale beer.  Billie appreciated that Dean even wore shorts for the occasion.  And that he would go on the back porch at night and stare out at the water and smell the water from the Gulf carried on the breeze and light up, the amber tip of his cigarette glowing against the summer dark.  It was one of their few reprieves.

Billie saw it as a good a time as any to check in.

“My number’s not up yet.  I know it ain’t,” Dean said defiantly, brazen.  But he was right.

“How many times has Michael gotten close over the years?”

Dean paused.  “A few,” he lied.  Billie knew it was more than that.  “But I just did what you said.  Just kept smokin’.”

“Good for you.”

“Whaddya want, Billie?”

Billie didn’t say anything for a moment.  “Nothing,” she said finally.  “Well.  Maybe I wanted to thank you.”

“Finally,” Dean scoffed.  “Been waitin’ on that for years.”  He took a drag and sighed.  “Sam wants to take Jack jet skiing.  They’re on the lookout for dolphins, manatees.  Can’t believe we let the kid come along – he can’t fuckin’ sit still.  Always wants to see the next thing.  Most times, I just wanna sit and watch the water.”

“It is beautiful down here,” Billie agrees, and she wondered when conversation got this easy with him.  Dean and Death – they were old friends.  He greeted her as such.  Dean coughed, short and sharp into his fist.

“And Cas, he wants to see the Everglades.  He says it’s been too long or something, that he hasn’t really paid them any mind since they formed.  It’s a bit of a drive, but it’s not like we can’t handle a bit of driving.  And we’ve got plenty of time.”

“And you, you just want to sit and watch the water?”

Dean chuckled.  “I do what they want to do.  And I do that.  Food’s good as hell down here.  Fresh seafood’s the best, Billie.”

He remembers going up to Donna’s cabin years ago to see Mom, how he quipped to Sam something about returning to yourself or whatever.  He kinda got where his past self was coming from now.

“Dean.”

He sighed, dropped his smoke onto the concrete and snuffed it out with his sandal.  “I know,” he said quietly.  “I can feel it, almost.  There’s…like a shift.  I think that’s part of why now was the time to come here, ya know?  They don’t know yet.  When we get back to Kansas.  We deserve to have that long.”

“You do.  Not disagreeing.”

“Why are you here, then?”

“Just to say hello,” Billie shrugged.  “And to say thanks, like I said.  This _was_ the right choice.”

Dean sighs.  “I know.  It just doesn’t always feel that way.”  He coughed again.  “See?”

“You did the right thing.  You listened to me for once.  You’ll see the payoff.”

But Billie, she saw more than just that.  She saw what was going to happen in the coming months.  She saw a doctor breaking news that they already knew was coming, had foreseen for years.  She saw Sam and Dean telling a devastated Mary, telling Jody Mills and Donna Hanscum and Bobby Singer and Rowena and Garth.  She saw Dean getting worse, Michael deteriorating right along with him.  She saw Jack coming in to Dean’s room with a genuine smile on his face and real sadness in his heart so the two of them could sit and laugh at _The Simpsons_ and bad slasher flicks.  She saw Cas, praying and praying and _praying_ , always so earnest, in hopes to make this as easy as possible, looking for confirmation that allowing his best friend to go through with this had truly been the best choice.  She saw poor Sam putting on a brave face and laughing with his brother as they joked about the disgusting and humbling job that was home care – they will try treatment, and Dean will eventually say _It’s just making me sicker.  I’ve had enough_.  And she saw Dean getting paler and paler and his eyes getting redder and more bruised and his appetite decreasing as he lost the taste for food, which is something he will cry over, an unexpected side effect.  She sees it getting worse and worse as he quietly slips away, without a bang but with a whimper, the exact opposite of what he wanted but the desired effect.  Dean doesn’t see all this yet.  He doesn’t know how hard breathing is going to get and how oxygen tanks get in the way of bowling and fishing, and he hasn’t yet brought up blood with his cough, a cough that’s really only in its infant stages.  Small mercies, she supposes.  He doesn’t see all this yet; that’s going to take some time.  Which, believe it or not, he still has some of.

The next time Dean sees Billie, he’ll be in the bunker, wandering its halls.  He did something similar as a young man, after a car crash.  This time, there’s no saving him.  Dean’s spirit will find Billie sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for him as she has for so many years.  He’ll know what’s going on, having been in the position before.  And he will go with her, Billie knows this. 

But there is still time laid out before them before any of this can happen.

“Hope to hell I do,” Dean says good-naturedly.  “Otherwise…”

“Otherwise what?”

Dean hemmed and hawed.  “I don’t know yet.  But I’ve got time to think of somethin’,” he grinned.  Billie almost smiled back.

“Ya know,” she began, changing the subject, “there’s a cute little bowling alley here in town that you all should check out.  I think you deserve to score a three-hundred while you’re in Florida.  And there’s plenty of fishing to be done.”

“Oh, I know ‘bout that,” Dean nodded.  “But thanks for the tip about the bowling alley.  We’ll definitely be checkin’ that out.”  He doesn’t say that it’s one of this dying man’s many wishes.  But he thinks it, and Billie can hear it.  She is Death – she kinda see and knows…not quite all, but almost.  “But Billie?”

“What.”

“What’s the payoff?”

She saw that coming, too.  He asks every time.  “The safety of the universe.”

“For me, I mean.”

Finally a selfish thought.

“The next time I see you, I’ll tell you.  In the meantime?  Bowling.”

Dean nods knowingly.  “Bowling.”

xXx

She greets him with a pack of Marlboro’s.

.

..

…

(But that’s not the payoff.)

**Author's Note:**

> Not gonna lie, this one made my throat feel a little thick in places, lol!
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
